What Susan Did Next
by Temple Cloud
Summary: At the funeral of her parents and siblings, Susan re-encounters an old friend. Oneshot.


Susan couldn't remember a time when she had felt more desolate. One time, maybe – but she had only been a child then, and it had only been a make-believe game, even if it had felt real at the time. Really, she and Peter had only entered into it so that Lucy wouldn't get too bored, being evacuated to an old country house where there hadn't been any little kids her own age. Still, it had _felt_ real, as much to her as to Lucy – but at least then, she'd had Lucy there for comfort. Now she never would again. No-one to snap, 'Oh, grow up!' at. And no Peter to snap, 'Why don't _you_ grow up!' at Susan herself. She'd had to identify some of the bodies from the train crash herself. Her parents, her brothers and her sister, and old Professor Kirke, plus a boy she had eventually realised was her cousin Eustace – not that Susan had had to have much to do with him since he had been a vicious toddler who bit and whose parents never told him off for it. Apparently, some of the other people killed had been a schoolfriend of Eustace's (from what she remembered of him, she supposed she should relieved to learn that he had even _had_ a friend), and an old lady who had been a friend of Professor Kirke since they were children.

If there was a God, Susan thought, it was a typically sick joke of His to arrange for every member of her family (apart from Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta) to be either on one of the two trains that had collided, or on the platform that one of them had rolled onto. Or was it supposed to be some kind of mercy killing, in which good friends were not separated in death? In which case, Susan supposed, she had been singled out to survive because she was no longer friends with any of them.

Well, no. Be rational. She had survived because she had been spending the day with Charlie. He had been telling her about his job, and how he had become interested in working with animals thanks to a wonderfully mad Biology teacher at his school who would keep absolutely _anything_ as a pet. Susan had been enjoying his stories, but worrying slightly about what would happen when she came to introduce Charlie to her parents. She could see herself trying to explain to her parents that yes, despite their rather common accents, Charlie and his brothers and sister had been educated at a boarding school – one for exceptionally gifted pupils, actually – not just the local council school, and that they had all stayed on till the age of eighteen except for two brothers who had left early to start a business, and one who had run away from school to serve in the War.

Well, there was no need for that conversation now.

Charlie had offered to come with her to the funeral. One of his brothers had been killed in the War, and he could imagine how much worse it must be to lose your entire family. Susan had wanted to say yes, until Charlie's mother had offered to come and help with the catering, and Susan had pictured what inviting the whole tribe would be like. Charlie's family was even more 'alternative' than Harold and Alberta Scrubb. It wasn't simply that they had evidently been growing their own food, and making-do-and-mending on clothing, long before rationing had made that a necessity for everyone. It was more that they were so out of mainstream society that they were embarrassingly amazed by _everything_. Instead, she'd arranged to go and stay with them afterwards.

The vicar had gone on about death being not an end but a beginning. Susan had managed to tune him out by concentrating on whether the trays of sandwiches she had prepared would be enough for all the mourners. Rationing was even worse now than it had been during the War, to the point where even bread was rationed now.

It wasn't enough, of course. Some of the guests nibbled politely, but others pitched in eagerly, pleased to be getting a free meal. One of the latter, a swarthy, bearded man Susan didn't recognise, even had the nerve to say, 'Hey, these sandwiches are _good!_ Are there any more?'

' _No!_ ' snapped Susan. 'I've done my best with what I had!' Including using up any unspent points on each deceased person's ration card, she mentally added. You had to be practical, after all. She remembered how the others – especially Lucy – would say, 'Susan's so _practical_ ,' in tones that made it obvious that this translated as 'boringly literal and unimaginative.'

'Have you checked in the kitchen?' the man asked. 'There might be some more back there.'

Susan knew perfectly well that there weren't, as she had fetched the food from the little kitchen off the church hall into the main room herself. She didn't even know who the man was, apart from being the sort of scrounger who gravitated to any free food. He wasn't a member of the family, and he was obviously too old to have been anyone Peter knew from school. One of their father's younger colleagues? He didn't look the type. She wasn't even sure what country he was from. He looked noticeably more foreign than most of the European refugees who had fled to Britain during the War, but he wasn't black or Indian. If anything, he looked like the Calormenes – though he certainly wasn't a spoilt, foppish prince like Rabadash…

'Stop that!' Susan told herself. 'Prince Rabadash was just someone in a story! And even if the Calormenes were real, they'd hardly turn up in an English church hall trying to scrounge sandwiches!'

To cover her confusion, she went out to the kitchen. To her annoyance, she noticed several trays of sandwiches and vol-au-vents which she had forgotten all about, a pineapple upside-down cake, and even half a dozen bottles of wine – not home-made wine, but genuine, imported wine made from real grapes. Susan knew she hadn't bought wine like that, unless the shock of the price had caused her to black out. Perhaps someone else had slipped it in. But who? Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta, maybe? It seemed unlikely, as they didn't drink. Could Charlie have sent it? But most of the drinks he liked were outlandish-sounding ones that Susan had never heard of.

'You were right,' she admitted wryly to the strange man, as she emerged laden with food. 'I wish I'd remembered them earlier. Most people are starting to go home now anyway.'

'Hey, everyone!' yelled the man. 'We've got leftovers, if you want to take anything home with you!'

As most of the gathering began to disperse, the dark man collected up the used plates and glasses. 'Could you do with a hand with washing up?' he asked.

Susan wondered whether he was trying to flirt with her. A year or so ago, before she'd met Charlie, she would have enjoyed the opportunity to flirt back (though maybe not with a man who must be at least in his thirties, and several inches shorter than she was). Now, she said warily, 'All right – it'll be quicker with two of us. I need to get away by five, to meet my boyfriend and his family.'

The dark man smiled. 'Yes, you don't want to let him slip through your fingers. Have you thought about working in conservation with him?'

Susan blinked. She hadn't even known the word 'conservation' until recently, at least as applied to animals, and when Charlie had first mentioned it, she had mistaken it for 'conversation'.

'I don't know,' she said. 'Most people don't even realise that the creatures Charlie protects exist at all. And if they did, they'd just think they were dangerous vermin, and that it makes no sense to protect them.'

'Like a lion giving his life to save a human?' said the man.

Susan stared at him. 'How do you know about…?' she began.

'Don't you remember me?'

Susan didn't recall ever having seen him in her life. And yet, he _did_ look familiar – perhaps someone she'd known when she was so much younger that, instead of his being shorter than her, he had been big enough to carry her on his back – and his long hair and beard had been golden, instead of black…

'You _did_ realise that I'd look different in your world, didn't you?'

…and he'd been a different species.

'Aslan?' said Susan, amazed.

'Well, it's not the name my parents gave me in this world, but it'll do,' the man said.

They looked at each other for a moment, and then both exclaimed, 'I've missed you so much!' and took their hands out of the washing-up water to give each other a slightly damp, soapy hug.

'Are you sure about that? That you've missed me?' Aslan asked, though without taking his arms from around Susan's shoulders. 'You've spent the last few years trying to convince yourself that I didn't even exist.'

'Well, I was trying to find some way of getting on with my life, considering that you seemed to have lost interest in me!' retorted Susan.

'What?' Susan didn't think she had ever seen Aslan look so hurt and baffled. In Narnia she had seen him sad sometimes, but he had always seemed to be in control of the situation. Now he looked devastated. 'Susan,' he went on, his voice shaking slightly, 'I've loved you since before your universe even existed. I _couldn't_ "lose interest in you" even if I wanted to. And I definitely don't want to.'

'I thought you only liked little kids like Lucy,' Susan muttered sulkily. 'You told Peter and me we were too old to come to Narnia again, and sent us back to this world where everything's just ordinary and unmagical. I didn't think you'd want to come to a place like this.'

' _Ordinary?_ I'll thank you not to call any of my worlds _ordinary!_ And especially not Earth!' If he had been this angry in lion-form, he would have been terrifying, but as a human, Susan could see that he wasn't in the sort of mood where you feel like killing someone, but only indignant. Perhaps it was just that she had had more practice in reading human facial expressions than those of lions. 'Earth was my home for over thirty years,' he pointed out, more gently. 'It was home to me in a way that Narnia never could be. When I'd peopled Narnia with talking animals, I could appear among them as an animal – most often a lion…'

'Most often? You mean you aren't always a lion there? I don't remember you ever not being a lion.'

'Well, no,' said Aslan, as if that should have been obvious, returning to rinsing crockery and leaving it to drain. 'If you didn't see a lion, you didn't know it was me.'

Susan had never wondered about that before. But when she thought back to the time that Aslan had turned Prince Rabadash into a donkey, it occurred to her that from Aslan's point of view, this probably didn't seem a particularly cruel punishment. After all, he probably had plenty of friends who were donkeys, perhaps had even _been_ a donkey sometimes, and wouldn't have thought that being a donkey was any more humiliating than being a lion or a human or any other creature.

'But Earth was where I found out what it was like to have a body all the time, whether I wanted it or not,' Aslan explained. 'It was all new to me: being born as a baby, having to learn how to walk and talk, starting school, being told off for arguing with the teacher, making friends with other children who liked me or disliked me for myself rather than what I represented – people I could have conversations with without their thinking either, "Are you going to eat me?" or, "Oh, you're so beautiful that you're welcome to eat me!"…'

'Living among ordinary people,' Susan summed it up.

' _Being_ an ordinary person,' Aslan corrected her. 'At least – my mum and my stepdad knew that I wasn't _exactly_ ordinary, but they had enough sense not to go on about it. They didn't treat me any differently from my brothers and sisters – except to the extent that being the oldest meant I got landed with looking after the younger ones, of course.'

Susan rolled her eyes, as one older sibling to another. 'And having to put up with relatives exclaiming over the new baby, as if it's vastly more interesting than you are!'

'Actually, I thought my new baby brothers and sisters _were_ pretty exciting, even when they threw up on me,' Aslan admitted. 'The hardest part was convincing the next-to-youngest that mum and dad hadn't stopped loving him. At least, it was hard until I was old enough to realise that reasoning with a two-year-old isn't as effective as giving them a cuddle.'

'Is that why you've come here? Now, I mean?'

'Yes. And to tell you that you were thoroughly worth dying for, even though I really, really _hate_ dying!'

For a moment Susan felt confused – Aslan had handed himself over to the White Witch to ransom Edmund, not her. Then she realised that he wasn't talking about Narnia.

'Wait – does that mean that – you have to die once on every inhabited world?'

'Thankfully, no,' Aslan said. 'What I did in Narnia to save one boy was only an echo of what I'd already done on Earth to save _all_ worlds: people in Narnia, people on Malacandra who lived billions of years before there was any life on Earth except microbes, and people on Perelandra whose civilisation will never be corrupted the way Earth's was, precisely because an Earth-human helped to defend Perelandra in its hour of need.'

'Did it – hurt a lot?' asked Susan, who knew this was a stupid question but felt she ought to say something.

'It was worse the first time round, because I hadn't done it before and I didn't know whether I could cope. Waiting for them to come and arrest me was a lot worse than actually being killed. For one thing, I didn't have you and Lucy to stroke my mane, then. But I wanted to tell you – I didn't do it _because_ the numbers saved would be great enough. If it had been just for you, or just for Edmund, or just for Tumnus, it would have been more than worth it.'

'Did you know when you were younger – when you were my age – what you were going to have to do?'

'No. Any more than you know what course your life is going to take, and what you'll be called upon to do. Now, it's time for me to go.'

'Will I ever see you again?'

'It depends how hard you're looking.' Aslan stepped out of the kitchen into the main hall. It didn't surprise Susan much that, when she went out a moment later to see whether there were any more glasses, there was no sign of him.

There was only one other person in the hall, a girl who looked about Lucy's age. 'Are you Lucy's sister?' she asked nervously.

'Yes, that's right. My name's Susan. Are you – I mean, were you – a friend of hers from school?'

'I was,' said the girl wretchedly. 'My name's Marjorie. We used to be best friends, and then we stopped talking to each other, and I was going to say sorry and ask if we could start being friends again, and then we had the telegram to say she was – was – and now we're never going to be able to make up ever again!' She burst into tears, and Susan hugged her.

'I'd sort of stopped being friends with my sister, as well,' she said. 'And now we can't tell her we're sorry. But I expect she knows, anyway.'

'If she's in Heaven, she won't be cross with us there, will she?' asked Marjorie.

'I don't think so, no.'

'But – but what if she _isn't_ in Heaven?' asked Marjorie worriedly.

'Why ever wouldn't she be?'

'Well, she was a bit – strange. She thought there might be people on other worlds.'

'Well? Why shouldn't there be?' Susan remembered having the same conversation with Professor Kirke, years ago when all this started.

'Well, my father says that if there were aliens, it'd tell us about them in the Bible. He says that belief in other worlds is a lie spread by the Devil, and anyone who is interested in them is demon-possessed and needs to be exorcised!'

'Does the Bible tell us about kangaroos and koalas in Australia?' asked Susan.

'Well, no.'

'So, just because something is true doesn't mean it has to be in the Bible,' Susan explained.

'Oh! No, I suppose – my father hadn't thought of that,' said Marjorie, clearly still processing the idea that parents aren't infallible. She paused. 'Do _you_ think there are other worlds?'

'I'm sure there are,' said Susan.

Marjorie helped her with the last of the washing-up, and, before she caught the bus home, they had exchanged addresses and telephone numbers and Susan had jotted down an invitation to tea next weekend. She hoped Marjorie's parents wouldn't decide that Susan was a Bad Influence.

In the meantime, it was time to catch the train over to where Charlie was picking her up. It had been a bizarre sort of afternoon, but at least she could talk about it to Charlie.

He was the sort of person who would understand.


End file.
